I spent four years as Forbes' Girl Friday, which to me meant doing a little bit of everything at once. As a member of the Forbes Entrepreneurs team, I looked at booming business and startup life with a female gaze. I worked on the PowerWomen Wealth and Celebrity 100 lists, keeping my ears pricked and pen poised for current event stories--from political sex scandals to celebrity gossip to international affairs. In 2012 I helped to put two South American women on the cover of FORBES Magazine: Modern Family star Sofia Vergara (the top-earning actress on U.S. television) and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who is transforming the BRIC nation into an entrepreneurial powerhouse. Prior to Forbes I was at the Philadelphia CityPaper, where I learned more than any girl ever needs to know about the city's seedier trades. I studied digital journalism at The University of The Arts.
I left Forbes in November, 2013, to pursue other interests on the West Coast.

Arianna Huffington On Leaning In, Leaning Back And The Second Women's Movement

For Arianna Huffington, the wake-up call came in 2007. Long hours spent building the Huffington Post, carting her youngest daughter around the country on college visits and working through the night to make up for what she considered “lost time,” she finally fainted from exhaustion one afternoon in her office. She hit her head on her desk and broke her cheekbone; it took five stitches in her left eye to put the Power Woman back to rights.

But while she recovered quickly—and fatefully merged her digital newshub with AOL for $315 million in 2011—it wasn’t until recently that Huffington has seen the rest of the world experience a similar awakening. In a heart-felt Wall Street Journal op-ed, Huffington responded to the now well-worn refrain of Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In,” a call to arms of working women everywhere to aggressively pursue success on full throttle by raising hands, speaking up and never, ever backing down. In the piece, Huffington argues that in order for women to “lean in,” they must also “lean back,” and focus on their health and wellness.

In doing so she just might be leading the charge for a second women’s movement in the United States.

I recently got the opportunity to visit Huffington in her East Village headquarters, where the president and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group played hostess to myself and two leading staffers, Lisa Belkin, HuffPost senior columnist on work, life and family and executive lifestyle editor Lori Leibovich. While a freak March snowstorm brewed outside, we talked at length about strategy in what Huffington calls a next-wave women’s movement.

“I think this really is a second women’s revolution,” she told me, surrounded by books in her recently redecorated office. “Because this time we’re not just fighting for a space in the world, we’re fighting to change it.”

The first women’s charge, as Huffington describes it, was the battle by women to enter the workforce—the acknowledgment that women should be able to hold any position she wants, to reach whatever height she aspires to and, of course, to be paid equally while doing so. While acknowledging that this first crusade is incomplete, its goals still in many ways unaccomplished, Huffington sees the second volley, led by female leaders and reinforced by rank-and-file Millennial women, is already underway.

Belkin, the former New York TimesMotherlode blogger who joined HuffPost in late 2011 and has been watching the pursuits of women at work for more than a decade, added that the shift in strategy is a marked one. “In the first few decades that we fought to enter the workforce,” she said, “We were, for lack of better language, just trying to be men ourselves. The shoulder pads, the ties, the briefcase, the whole thing.” Over time women realized that not only was that a Sisyphean fight, but that their efforts were ruining relationships, affecting children and increasing stress-related diseases to epidemic levels. By Huffington’s count working women are 40% more likely to develop heart disease and 60% more likely to fall victim to diabetes.

“It’s not enough to enter the world of men now,” Huffington said. “I’m even more excited about the second women’s revolution because it’s one where we change the metrics of that world and we reshape the way it functions.” For women, she told me, but for men too, the new metric of success is well-being. Not ony do studies show that less stress and more flexibility lead to a more productive workforce, but Huffington believes a revitalized leader is better equipped to make the increasingly fraught decisions today’s executives are called upon to make.

For Huffington’s own staffers—more than 200 of them—reshaping the workplace is something of a mandate within the corporate culture. The motto “stress less, live more,” is the battle cry of Lebovich’s lifestyle operation, which encompasses 13 HuffPost verticals and employs more than 50. “Ours is a company led by a woman who espouses this stuff,” she said, explaining the focus on wellness that’s become part of the legend of Arianna Huffington and her personal brand. (It’s more than just talk, too. When I’m offered a tour of the office nap-rooms both are occupied and I’m told the new Washington DC locale brags not just nap rooms but a meditation center and a yoga room).

“We’re a 24-hour news organization that prides itself on being first,” Leibovich said. What is she getting at? That if wellness can be paramount at HuffPost, it could happen anywhere. Or at least, staffers agree, between the lead-by-example attitude and the ability to push an editorial message of well-being to more than 200 million global readers each month, they’re well-positioned to wear the mantle and lead the vanguard of the movement.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Comments

While I am on the other side of the great divide politically from Mrs. Huffington, I totally agree with the premise of your article and her place in it. I have found that female leaders who adopt a more feminine approach to leadership typically get higher rates of collaboration, better communication among departments and less office politics.

The interesting thing would be to hear responses from what men think about the world being changed by women and how they would react.

Much of what Arianna Huffington says she represents is admirable. However, the truth is that many of the bloggers and contributors to the Huffington Post get paid NOTHING, and many are women. So I have a difficult time believing that she truly means what she says; perhaps she’s more interested in maintaining her admirable public image than in genuinely helping others improve themselves and their careers.

OMG! This really works! I just got paid $6784 working off my laptop for doing extra easy tasks from this one cool site! Whoever needs extra cash can do it this way, and best of all, be paid weekly! Tasks are so easy to do that even a 10 yr old kid can do it. You won’t forgive yourself if you don’t check it out! Rich45.C0M_

A huge piece is missing. I don’t think you can skip lightly from Movement 1 to Movement 2. Try as you must, you’re failing if you try to convince current female workers that they’re any different from women of past struggles. Those of you who are trying are merely privileged women in the first place. Bottom line: you don’t really know what it’s like. You will never know.

the only question i have is whether the foundation used by ms huffington is pink plaster of paris. strange how a woman who still uses her ex husband’s name and achieved much of her early clout being a beard for a wealthy gay man, knows anything about the women’s movement. seems more like she is an expert in how an immigrant makes good with the right marriage.

EnThere has not be a female dominate culture since the Minoan civilization; it was a Bronze Age civilization that arose on the island of Crete and flourished from approximately the 27th century BCE to the 15th century BCE Minions. It is one of the only cultures were among the archaeological remains there are NO statutes of Generals, NO depiction of Battles: just depictions of nature, scenes of games and bare breasted woman holding snakes above their heads. Perhaps that was enough to distract the men from warring and spent their time developing a fleet of trading vessels that sail the entire Mediterranean. Best of Luck to all you woman we men a have made a mess out of this planet………….the return of the Goddess, three cheers……..

Why does Huffington Post continue to run tabloid-style stories and headlines? What a setback for women! Women are past that don’t continue to revive something we’ve long since left behind in our culture. It’s embarrassing.

Thank you Meghan for sharing you thoughts on the Huffington Post piece that health and wellness is a critical component for success in our personal and professional lives. I am a strong believer and advocate for a healthy well rounded lifestyle. Love the suggestion that Women should take the lead in redefining success to be more than money and power.

By Women taking the lead on a healthy lifestyle, it provides a platform for Women to help each other outside of the workplace. Another topical debate where we as Women need to help each other professionally and personally instead of seeing each other as competitors.

Have any of these women Sheryl whatsherface writes about – including herself – done ANY MANUAL LABOUR? Seems all they’re talking about is office stuff, sitting at a desk in front of a computer screen. They aren’t even addressing the masses of women who work the floors of retail, or the floors and counters and kitchens of restaurants and bars. And it seems unlikely they even know anyone who works on a farm, works on telephone and cable-internet lines, who drives a UPS truck, or the women who fly airplanes or work as flight attendants and ticket-counter clerks, who teach school, who police their neighbourhoods, who work in their clinics and hospitals as docs, nurses, orderlies, who work as housekeepers in their homes or custodians in their airports and other public buildings, who work the lights and cameras and set-flats of their movies and TV shows. THESE ARE THE PLACES WHERE WOMEN WORK – get a grip!

Ms. Huffington’s comment “…it’s one where we change the metrics of that world and we reshape the way it functions” works not only as the clarion call of the 2nd women’s movement but as a goal for all of human kind. Nothing will change until we change the metrics of the world’s functionality. Women can lead the way to making change happen. Our challenge is to realize that we are mother earth, it is our role and our right to protect and to shape the world and its inhabitants to the benefit of humanity – men, women & children. We must be change leaders and stewards of that change.

Breanne Fahs’ very interesting book “Performing Sex: The Making and Unmaking of Women’s Erotic Lives” (SUNY Press, 2011) provides an interesting, dispassionate and very valuable scholarly analysis of the entire gray-scale gamut of women’s experience in a variety of situations, indicating how far we have or have not come as a society since the fifties. It’s not just in leadership positions that women are bewilderingly underprivileged.